Fine, I'll build my own text editor

dang

Recent and related: They don't make 'em like Sublime Text anymore - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49209354 - Aug 2026 (13 comments)

anon291

I am being pushed to use vs code right now by my team, but we already have a fully programmable and scriptable editor called emacs that is 100000x better. I don't understand why everyone just switches to these random tools. Text editing is a solved problem. Most of the supposed advantages of these tools is just a configuration of vim or emacs.

pmkary

Text editors are like mechanical watches or fountain pens. There is just so much beauty in the machinery that makes them. For me, there are hardly any other modules that are this satisfying to watch being made. Each time I find a new one (a good one like this), with everything on ropes and rendering and I-beam placement computations and ... it feels like a Christmas gift.

self_awareness

Text editing is a solved problem. It's not about the style of cursor, or if rope is used or not. We already have answers to that. It's about remote editing, LSP support.

samus

Every time someone has that idea they discover that text editing is hard! Kudos to the author that they considered accessibility as well.

nottorp

There really is a fps counter on there. Is the experiment seriously rendering continuously in a loop?

akersten

Yes, who would have guessed that the <textarea> element, designed specifically for this use case and built into browsers for 3 decades, would be the most performant and behaviorally consistent way to implement editable text. I'm kind of sad the author stopped shedding unneeded complexity there though... we're not really building a text editor yet, we're building a website with a fancy input field. If we want to build a proper text editor we must eschew the bloat that is the web browser too.

stillpointlab

I literally just got Fable to write me a text editor. Well, I'll be honest, I got it to wrap the KDE KTextEditor library which is like 90% of a text editor. I had been using Kate which was what an LLM suggested was the closest to something like Sublime Text on Fedora. But even Kate, which was great, had too much going on. So I asked Fable to take the text editor part (KTextEditor) and wrap it using Rust with an LSP server. It took about 2 days but I have a tiny, super fast little editor. I use Sway to manage things like tabs, fuzzel stands in for fuzzy file search, broot stands in for an explorer view. I've already added Markdown preview support. I might get around to some basic git integration. Then I got it to turn that little editor into a note-taking interface that I have bound to a Mod-m key binding to keep notes in ~/Notes. We live in wild times. I hope everyone is taking advantage while they can.

globalnode

The problem with writing an editor if you intend to use it for coding, is not the text editor itself, that's rather simple. The problem is code completion and syntax highlighting. Then whatever system you try to implement becomes just as bloated as the bloatware you're trying to replace.

erichocean

If you want to do this in Clojure, Clobber[0] is a great base to start from. It can be used in headless-mode, I've hooked it up to the latest JavaFX text editing component it works very nicely. [0] https://github.com/phronmophobic/clobber